Cybermohalla Hub


Book Description

The Cybermohalla project takes on the meaning of the Hindi word mohalla (neighborhood) in its sense of alleys and corners, relatedness and concreteness, as a means for talking about one's "place" in the city. Initiated by the Delhi-based research institute Sarai/CSDS and Ankur, Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller developed a project that involves approximately seventy young practitioners, the Cybermohalla Ensemble, who engage with their urban contexts through various media. Cybermohalla Hub, a hybrid of studio, school, archive, community center, library, and gallery is a structure that moves between Delhi and diverse art contexts including Manifesta 7 and, most recently, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. The Cybermohalla experiment has been engaged in rethinking urban life, and reimagining and reanimating the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual life in contemporary cities. The book not only documents the architecture of the project, which functions as an attempt to "build knowledge," but also publishes insights that have emerged from the project as a whole. Contributors Can Altay, Cybermohalla Ensemble, Rana Dasgupta, Hu Fang, Naeem Mohaiemen, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jacques Rancière, Raqs Media Collective, Superflex, et al.




Mansion


Book Description

Magnificent in scope and intensely moving, Mansion spans the long years between the fall of the Khalsa regime and the turbulence of the British Raj. Innumerable characters populate these pages: from the wily Diwan Dhanpat Rai to the idealistic Lekhraj; from innocent Rukmo to outspoken Bhagsuddhi. Men and women shape their worlds, lose their grip and footholds, and become adrift in the fierce vortices of unforeseen events. But for the Diwan’s mansion itself, each event is only a passing moment in the town’s colourful history. Ambitious and elegant, Mansion is a gripping tale about power: its arrogance and spectacle, and the many claimants and renouncers who desire or fear it.




The Architecture of Transgression


Book Description

Transgression suggests operating beyond accepted norms andradically reinterpreting practice by pushing at the boundaries ofboth what architecture is, and what it could or even should be. Thecurrent economic crisis and accompanying political/social unresthas exacerbated the difficulty into which architecture has longbeen sliding: challenged by other professions and a culture ofconservatism, architecture is in danger of losing its prized statusas one of the pre-eminent visual arts. Transgression opens up newpossibilities for practice. It highlights the positive impact thatworking on the architectural periphery can make on the mainstream,as transgressive practices have the potential to reinvent andreposition the architectural profession: whether they aresubverting notions of progress; questioning roles and mechanisms ofproduction; aligning with political activism; pioneering urbaninterventions; advocating informal or incomplete development;actively destabilising environments or breaking barriers of taste.In this new dispersed and expanded field of operation, the balanceof architectural endeavour is shifted from object to process, fromservice to speculation, and from formal to informal in a way thatprovides both critical and political impetus to proactively affectchange. Contributors: Can Altay, Edward Denison and Guangyu Ren, KimDovey, Chris Jenks, David Littlefield, Silvia Loeffler, AlistairParvin, Louis Rice, Patrik Schumacher and Robin Wilson Featured architects: atelier d’architectureautogérée, Lina Bo Bardi, Construire/La Machine, EXYZT,Didier Faustino/Bureau des Mésarchitectures, Lacaton &Vassal, N55, Catie Newell/*Alibi Studio, Wang Shu, Superflex andBernard Tschumi




Free Berlin


Book Description

An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity. In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city. These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects. With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.




Sculpture Unlimited


Book Description

This reader, based on a symposium at the Department of Sculpture, Transmedial Space, University of Art and Design, Linz, poses profound questions about contemporary sculpture.




Basanti


Book Description

The braid of young Basanti’s life thickens with time. Feisty and fearless, she plays hide and seek with her overbearing father, dodges the crippled old tailor whom she’s sold to and elopes with a handsome young man. Unwilling to let anyone suppress her spirit, she even rejects the benevolence of Shyama bibi, her confidante and employer. With the thunderous clap of demolition of a basti in Delhi and a complex understanding of the confluence of classes, renowned writer Bhisham Sahni gives voice, laughter and resolve to a persona who might have otherwise coursed silently away through the veins of this megacity.




Accumulation


Book Description

Examines how images of accumulation help open up the climate to political mobilization The current epoch is one of accumulation: not only of capital but also of raw, often unruly material, from plastic in the ocean and carbon in the atmosphere to people, buildings, and cities. Alongside this material growth, image-making practices embedded within the fields of art and architecture have proven to be fertile, mobile, and capacious. Images of accumulation help open up the climate to cultural inquiry and political mobilization and have formed a cultural infrastructure focused on the relationships between humans, other species, and their environments. The essays in Accumulation address this cultural infrastructure and the methodological challenges of its analysis. They offer a response to the relative invisibility of the climate now seen as material manifestations of social behavior. Contributors outline opportunities and ambitions of visual scholarship as a means to encounter the challenges emergent in the current moment: how can climate become visible, culturally and politically? Knowledge of climatic instability can change collective behavior and offer other trajectories, counteraccumulations that draw the present into a different, more livable, future. Contributors: Emily Apter, New York U; Hans Baumann; Amanda Boeztkes, U of Guelph; Dominic Boyer, Rice U; Lindsay Bremner, U of Westminster; Nerea Calvillo, U of Warwick; Beth Cullen, U of Westminster; T. J. Demos, U of California, Santa Cruz; Jeff Diamanti, U of Amsterdam; Jennifer Ferng, U of Sydney; Jennifer Gabrys, U of Cambridge; Ian Gray, U of California, Los Angeles; Gökçe Günel, Rice U; Orit Halpern, Concordia U; Gabrielle Hecht, Stanford U; Cymene Howe, Rice U; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser U; Robin Kelsey, Harvard U; Bruno Latour, Sciences Po, Paris; Hannah le Roux, U of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Nashin Mahtani; Kiel Moe, McGill U; Karen Pinkus, Cornell U; Stephanie Wakefield, Life U; McKenzie Wark, The New School; Kathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary U of London.




Along the Indian Highway


Book Description

This book is an ethnographic study of the travelling art exhibition Indian Highway that presented Indian contemporary art in Europe and China between 2008 and 2012, a significant period for the art world that saw the rise and fall of the national exhibition format. It analyses art exhibition as a mobile "object" and promotes the idea of art as a transcultural product by using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and multi-media studies as research method. This work encompasses voices of curators, artists, audiences, and art critics spread over different cities, sites, and art institutions to bridge the distance between Europe and India based on vignettes along the Indian Highway. The discussion in the book focuses on power relations, the contested politics of representation, and dissonances and processes of negotiation in the field of global art. It also argues for rethinking analytical categories in anthropology to identify the social role of contemporary art practices in different cultural contexts and also examines urban art and the way national or cultural values are reinterpreted in response to ideas of difference and pluralism. Rich in empirical data, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of modern and contemporary art, Indian art, art and visual culture, anthropology, art history, mobility, and transcultural studies.




Passages of Play in Urban India


Book Description

In this book, Prasad Khanolkar offers a new way of thinking about ‘slums’ and southern cities based on a grounded engagement with the relationship between media, objects, spaces, and people in the everyday life of slum localities in Mumbai, India. Over the past few decades, Mumbai, like many cities in the global South, has experienced a series of overarching governmental missions to program it into an interoperable and profitable city. Its ‘slums’, which house a majority of its population don’t fit within the dominant registers and continue to be deemed as excess. Urban residents inhabiting Mumbai’s slum localities thus find themselves in the middle of missions, policies, and programs that are not of their making, just as often that they find themselves localized by lack of resources, caste system, communal conflicts, and territorial jurisdictions. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in slum localities of Mumbai, this book explores how its residents engage in different forms of play in order to extend and expand their field of possibilities, despite the limitations and fixities. The book attends to some of these playacts: imparting stories with different thicknesses, rehearsing roles on and offscreen, engaging in deceptive performances, experimenting with repetitive everyday rhythms, and recycling matter and forms. Through these playacts, urban residents explore the virtual abilities of different mediums to put bodies, objects, and spaces into new forms of relationships and create passages to depart from programmed urban futures. By attending to these proliferating urban passages of different residents in slum localities, the book makes a case for rethinking southern cities as mediums for urban lives to converge and depart without an overarching framework. The book makes a significant contribution in the field of urban studies, urban anthropology, urban geography, and urban sociology. It will be of interest to scholars and students working on postcolonial cities, Southern urbanisms, infrastructure studies, and urban planning in the global South.




For Revolt


Book Description

This striking interpretation of Rancière's uncompromising view of emancipation draws on his Maoist commitments and invariably rational and Kantian-moralist basis. Tracing the logic of abstract and atemporal space in all of Rancière's work, it stands in contrast to the prevailing tendency to emphasise his sensitivity to evolving historical forms and changing regimes of sensibility. Overturning the meaning of Rancière's interest in the sensible makes the object of his thinking clear: a revolt against a reality structured according to ordered temporalities and forms of appearance. In making its case, For Revolt reconstructs Rancière's relations to some of the crucial, yet unexplored, politico-historical frameworks of his thought, such as the Cultural-Revolutionary Maoism and the French Revolution, offering a fresh perspective on these revolutionary paradigms. Going against dominant views, this book argues for a fundamentally positive influence of Louis Althusser's philosophy on Rancière's thought and analyses his relation to Marx and Kant based on previously undiscussed early student work. Through a critical discussion of Rancière, For Revolt sheds light on the present predicament of emancipatory politics – its emphasis on the actualities of here and now and its difficulties in envisaging programmatic realisations of radically alternative futures.